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Dec 27, 2013 at 4:50 AMDec 27, 2013 at 9:22 AM

Editor’s Note: Each year, the Times Record newsroom staff votes on the Top 10 local stories of the year. The arming of teachers and staff members in the Clarksville School District ranks as the No. 5 story of 2013.

Editor’s Note: Each year, the Times Record newsroom staff votes on the Top 10 local stories of the year. The arming of teachers and staff members in the Clarksville School District ranks as the No. 5 story of 2013.

Asked about being one of a handful of school districts with armed security staff, Clarksville Superintendent David Hopkins said last week everything seemed to be "going really well."

Clarksville School District was among 13 Arkansas school districts holding security guard commissions in 2013 from the Arkansas Board of Private Investigators and Private Security Agencies.

Citing the $50,000 cost of adding one school resource officer, school administrators chose instead to spend almost $70,000 to train and arm volunteer teachers and staff who serve in dual roles — as district employees in their primary jobs and as security guards able and willing to respond to armed threats at the school. The Clarksville district already had one school resource officer who divided his time among the district’s five campuses.

The Clarksville School Board made their decision in May in response to the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School at Newtown, Conn. Twenty children and six school staff members died when an armed intruder entered the school and began shooting.

Thirteen trained and armed faculty and staff members began serving in their dual roles on Sept. 12, a day after the state regulatory board reversed its security guard suspensions for the 13 districts. Hopkins has said he’d like to boost the district’s licensure from 13 armed security guards to 22.

Walther Arms of Fort Smith helped the district staff purchase the firearms, and the volunteer guards trained at Nighthawk Custom Training Academy at Centerton, their training overseen by Springdale Police SWAT team officers.

Commission Controversy

On Aug. 1, Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel issued an opinion stating that Arkansas law does not give the board the authority to allow public schools, which are government agencies, to employ teachers and staff as security guards.

In response, on Aug. 14, just before classes began for the 2013-14 school year, the board suspended the commissions, and Clarksville, Lake Hamilton and Cutter-Morning Star school districts appealed the suspensions.

In its Sept. 11 decision, the Arkansas Board of Private Investigators lifted the suspension on the two-year commissions already granted, but said it would not accept any new registrations from school districts. And the board stated it would not renew the commissions unless the state Legislature changed the law to allow it.

Hopkins said district officials were working with state Sens. Gary Stubblefield, R-Branch, Bryan King, R-Berryville, and Jeremy Hutchinson, R-Little Rock, on proposed legislation to maintain high standards for licensing security guards within school districts that would place the control in the hands of local boards rather than so many state agencies.

Hopkins said the district’s armed staff re-qualified in November at the Police Academy Re-qualification Course and did more safety training. They re-qualify every six months. A joint training program with local police officers was postponed due to the winter storm. The snow days that were to be used for the training will now be classroom days and the security guard-police training exercise will be rescheduled, Hopkins said. Staff held a verbal joint round-table drill with the Clarksville Police Department, but have not yet physically run the scenarios with them, he said.

Asked how well the program is working, Hopkins said: "Whether it’s working or not is hard to say, and all you can do is work to protect your kids. A recent Sandy Hook investigation found there were no indicators that could have predicted that attack. … All you can do is react."

The response time for the Dec. 13 shooting at Arapahoe High School at Centennial, Colo., was 80 seconds because there was a resource officer in the school, Hopkins said.

In that incident, 18-year-old student Karl Halverson Pierson took a pump-action shotgun and other weapons into the Colorado school. He purportedly was looking for a librarian against whom he had a grudge. He shot another student, Claire Davis, 17, in the head then killed himself. Davis lingered in the hospital in a coma until she died on Saturday.

"As a school superintendent, for me this is not about politics. This is about how we can best protect our children," Hopkins said.

Enhancing Security

Staff’s firearms are concealed so that others wouldn’t even know the gun is there, Hopkins said, and the district implemented other security measures, including non-shattering window film and security doors. District officials are working with the National Rifle Association’s National School Shield program to assess the district’s security program, and have applied for a NRA grant for security, he said.

Most school shooters are students, and when that happens the structural security devices, such as the locked-door systems are not helpful, Hopkins acknowledged. The student is already in the school; you let him in, he said.

The district’s emergency response team frequently discusses the "what-ifs," he said. What if a student poses the armed threat? What about the emotional toll that would take the person responsible for making such a tough decision?

"And that was part of our intense firearms training. … The fact is, if you have an armed threat, you have to take out the armed threat. It doesn’t matter if you’re a police officer or otherwise. If you are confronted with shooting a child, it takes an extreme emotional toll," Hopkins said.

"We’ve looked at best practices, looked at the ways police and military handle such situations. All we can do is plan and train, … and if you’re well-trained, your training takes over, … based on the evidence we’ve seen," Hopkins said.

Hopkins said he repeatedly goes over and over the school shooting scenario in his mind, the best practices, the response time and cost constraints, and it always comes back to having armed people in the school buildings.

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